Current location in this text. Enter a Perseus citation to go to another section or work. Full search
options are on the right side and top of the page.

Now there have been many women celebrated for
their beauty (for, as Euripides says—

E'en an old bard may sing of memory)

There was, for instance, Thargelia the Milesian, who was
married to fourteen different husbands, so very beautiful and
accomplished was she, as Hippias the Sophist says, in his
book which is entitled Synagoge. But Dinon, in the fifth
book of his History of Persia, and in the first part of it, says
that the wife of Bagazus, who was a sister of Xerxes by
the same father, (and her name was Anytis,) was the most
beautiful and the most licentious of all the woman in Asia.
And Phylarchus, in his nineteenth book, says that Timosa,
the concubine of Oxyartes, surpassed all women in beauty,
and that the king of Egypt had originally sent her as a
present to Statira, the wife of the king.

And Theopompus, in the fifty-sixth book of his History,
speaks of Xenopithea, the mother of Lysandrides, as the
most beautiful of all the women in Peloponnesus. And the
Lacedæmonians put her to death, and her sister Chryse also,
when Agesilaus the king, having raised a seditious tumult in
the city, procured Lysandrides, who was his enemy, to be
banished by the Lacedæmonians. Pantica of Cyprus was
[p. 972]
also a very beautiful woman; and she is mentioned by
Phylarchus, in the tenth book of his History, where he says
that when she was with Olympias, the mother of Alexander,
Monimus, the son of Pythion, asked her in marriage. And,
as she was a very licentious woman, Olympias said to him—
“O wretched man, you are marrying with your eyes, and not
with your understanding.” They also say that the woman
who brought back Pisistratus to assume the tyranny, clad in
the semblance of Minerva the Saviour, was very beautiful, as
indeed she ought to have been, seeing that she assumed the
appearance of a goddess. And she was a seller of garlands;
and Pisistratus afterwards gave her in marriage to Hipparchus his son, as Clidemus relates in the eighth book of
his Returns, where he says—-“And he also gave the woman,
by name Phya, who had been in the chariot with him, in
marriage to his son Hipparchus. And she was the daughter
of a man named Socrates. And he took for Hippias, who
succeeded him in the tyranny, the daughter of Charmus the
polemarch, who was extraordinarily beautiful.”

And it happened, as it is said, that Charmus was a great
admirer of Hippias, and that he was the man who first
erected a statue of Love in the Academy, on which there is
the following inscription—

O wily Love, Charmus this altar raised
At the well-shaded bounds of her Gymnasium.

Hesiod, also, in the third book of his Melampodia, calls
Chalcis in Eubœa,

Land of fair women;—

for the women there are very beautiful, as Theophrastus
also asserts. And Nymphodorus, in his Voyage round Asia,
says that there are nowhere more beautiful women than
those in Tenedos, an island close to Troy.

Athenaeus. The Deipnosophists. Or Banquet Of The Learned Of Athenaeus. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1854.

The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.

An XML version of this text is available for download,
with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted
changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.